Measure Twice, by Owen Tallis
An original short story extract set in the twentieth century.
Elias Marten had worked as a tailor in the two rooms above the saddler’s on Corve Street since 1927, and in all that time he had never refused a customer. So when the bell at the foot of the stairs rang on a wet Thursday in April 1961 and David Sefton came up and stood on the mat, turning his hat round and round in his hands, Elias put down his shears and said ‘Good afternoon’ in exactly the voice he used for everybody.
Two years earlier, three weeks before the wedding, David Sefton had broken off his engagement to Elias’s daughter in a letter. Dulcie had gone to Birmingham that autumn and found work in an insurance office, and she came home at Christmas and not otherwise. Her wedding dress, which her mother had made, still hung in the wardrobe on the landing in a cotton sheet.
‘I’m getting married in June,’ David said. ‘A girl from Tenbury. I know I’ve no right to ask. But my father always came to you, and I didn’t want to go anywhere else.’
Elias looked at him for a long moment over the top of his spectacles. Then he took the tape from round his own neck.
‘Arms out,’ he said.
He measured him the way he measured everyone, chest and waist and seat, shoulder to wrist, nape to heel, calling the figures out to nobody. Then he reached for the order book, and it fell open at the page it had been opened at most: David Sefton, two summers ago, a morning coat in charcoal, and across it, in red ink, Cancelled. Neither of them spoke. Elias turned to a clean page and wrote the new figures in his small, square hand. They had not changed at all.
David chose a grey worsted from the pattern book. It was the same cloth, though he could not have known it, that Elias had laid by on the top shelf two summers ago for his own suit as father of the bride.
‘You could send him to Hereford,’ his wife said that night. ‘Nobody would blame you.’
‘He came to me,’ said Elias.
At the second fitting he stood behind David at the long mirror, pinning the left sleeve, and saw quite clearly that he could leave it a quarter of an inch short. Nobody would notice: not the groom, not the bride, not the photographer. Only a tailor would ever know. Every time David Sefton raised his glass or shook a hand, the cuff would ride up a little, and Elias would know.
He worked late that night with the lamp pulled low over the bench. Twice he took the sleeve out and twice he set it in again. At one o’clock his wife heard the treadle stop, and then start again, and go on until the birds began.
David collected the suit on the last Saturday in May. It fitted him as if he had been born in it. He turned in front of the mirror and lifted his arms, and the cuffs lay exactly where they should, half an inch of white shirt showing and not a hair more.
‘What do I owe you, Mr Marten?’
Elias told him, and took the notes, and counted them, and gave him his change to the penny. At the door David hesitated. ‘Is Dulcie well?’
‘She is very well,’ said Elias. ‘Good day to you.’
When the bell had stopped, he went up the ladder to the top shelf and took down what was left of the grey worsted, a yard and a half perhaps. He stood for a while with it over his arm. Then he folded it and put it back, because it was good cloth, and one day, he supposed, somebody would have a use for it.
“Elias Marten is presented as a bitter man who wants to punish David Sefton.”
To what extent do you agree with this view?
You should write about:
You must refer to the language used in the text to support your answer.
120 exam-style questions on Eduqas GCSE English Language 1.3 Critical reading and comprehension, covering 1.3.1 Identifying and interpreting themes, ideas and information, 1.3.2 Reading in different ways for different purposes, 1.3.4 Supporting a point of view with textual evidence, and 1.3.6 Reflecting critically and evaluatively on text. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.